


In my body

by kate_kate



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Close to Canon, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Season 3b/ep16, Sick Magnus Bane
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 12:27:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29295894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kate_kate/pseuds/kate_kate
Summary: Magnus rejected Lorenzo's magic and now his life is in danger. Lost in his dream he relives some of his childhood.
Relationships: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood
Comments: 19
Kudos: 35





	In my body

**Author's Note:**

> I always wondered what Magnus could see or feel during his coma, and if listening to Alec's voice could bring him back. This is what I figured out.
> 
> The song entwined into the fic is the very same background song of the episode, Body by SYML
> 
> Notice that Wayan is the name traditionally given to the male firstborn in Indonesia (well...Wikipedia dixit!)

It all looked like a dream.

Sure, it was supposed to be a dream. Nowhere else in the damn world could he feel himself so light, so intangible, devoid of substance. Of that pitiful matter that actually linked his immortal body to reality, yet left it so vulnerable.

He was curled up into a fetal position, yet aware of every single muscle and tendon, his mind roaming upon every inch of exposed skin, trying to test his own sensations.

He slowly lifted his head, in an effort to look around and figure out where he was – but was it truly that important?

Everything was clouded by a tenuous haze, lustful foliage of trees peeking behind, deep colors of a flowery landscape, a brightness so intense that it almost hurt his eyes. If he could find the gut to open them. Quite clichéd, as a dream.

He perceived a soft and damp soil underneath – grass? mud? – not unpleasant, while his nose was picking up a strong, sweetish scent, reminiscent of... magnolias? Something intensely alive but so mature to be on the verge of rotting.

He tried to disentangle his body and finally opened his eyes. First, he saw the lush grass he was lying on, until his eyes fell back on his own hands, which were... small? Like they belonged to a child... Dirty, broken nails. He stood staring at them without understanding, as if his mind didn’t want to realize what his eyes were seeing.

Suddenly, he heard a voice. "Wayan! Wayan, where are you?" That voice...

"Mama?"

_In my body I have a master  
I bow down when she comes around  
In my body I'm a disaster  
I break down when you shake the ground_

The voice was approaching, sounding concerned. The haze had lifted up, and a landscape had appeared all around, so achingly familiar, yet so long gone in time that its memory was almost lost: yet, these were the rice paddies of his childhood, the swampy reeds and the lush jungle backdrop to his early years. The blue hills in the distance, the lazy muddy river whose waters were often diverted to flood the fields, where – his mother? – worked from dawn to dusk for gaining a handful of rice barely enough to feed the two of them, but which turned gold in the pockets of the rich white people, the Dutch devils.

"Wayan, where are you? Ah, here you are, you scared me to death!".

Wayan couldn't utter a single word. _Mom_ , he thought, _Mom_... She took him in her arms, clutching him. Wayan almost fainted from feeling so safe into those arms clenched around him, and clung to that beloved body, as if his life depended on it.

His life? The feeling of a warm body, as familiar as his own, an unchangeable certainty, something that would last forever...

_Forever?_

Wayan started to cry. There was something wrong with all this, something UNCERTAIN, FEARFUL, a feeling of terror that didn’t leave him. Because Wayan felt. Knew. He didn't know where that immutable, absolute CERTAINTY came from - but he knew that something bad would happen to his mom soon, and he couldn't save her.

Actually, it would have been his fault.

Everything was already written in the huge book of destiny.

They were doomed.

He let tears flow freely down his cheeks and placed his head in the hollow between her neck and shoulder, smelling her scent (that smell he remembered so well, engraved in his mind like the scent of magnolias that would always haunt him).

Because that, in his mom's life, would be the last day.

"Don't cry Wayan, sweetheart, nothing happened, I was just afraid I'd lost you. Don't ever scare me like that again! Let's go home now."

"No, no, no home!!" How could you warn your mom that something terrible is about to happen? He felt helpless, but he also knew that there was nothing he could do. They quickly made their way to the hut they lived into, not that far from there, among the rice fields.

Upon arriving at the door, mom realized there was a man waiting for her. A white man.

Wayan squirmed to make mom put him down, but she was already paying no more attention to him.

She approached cautiously to the man, who was smiling, and beckoning her to come closer. She slowly pulled over him – she already knew what that man wanted, and she had to give it to him, otherwise he would chase her and her baby away, or worse, he would kill them without the slightest remorse or concern; they were nothing more than two miserable, negligible people. They would die, either killed or starved to death, she did not care about herself, but what would happen to her child?

She was one step away from the man now, he was beckoning her to enter the hut, casting Wayan a glance that said "don't meddle with me."

Wayan looked at the man with hatred. He watched him touch his mother, stroking her as she tried to step away from him. The man then hit her throwing her to the ground.

A brand new rage burst he had never experienced before arose from the bottom of his heart, suffocating his mind, his consciousness, sneaking through his arms and hands to his fingertips, choking him, blinding him, until he couldn’t see anything but a red mist and the world disappeared behind a smokescreen. He felt that rage coalescing inside, turning into something alive, solid; if his child brain could bring it into reality, he would have shaped it as a fire-spitting dragon.

One of those creatures summoned by his mom’s tales or carved into the walls of the city temple he once had been brought at.

He craved to be so powerful to command one of those dragons to rise and destroy the white devils.

Wishing he could ask the great dragon for magicking some more food or new clothes.

At that time, however, he suddenly needed simply revenge.

And as such, he struck.

From Wayan's hands a living, huge flame erupted, a superhuman torch shaping into an actual dragon, horns, fangs, claws, which enveloped the white man. He opened his eyes wide like he was trying to hypnotize that living thing heading towards him; when it hit him, he opened his mouth in a scream, but almost didn't have the time, being transformed in a matter of seconds to a shapeless blackened corpse.

Wayan stood dumbfounded staring at the scene, then watched his hands. Baby hands. While his adult mind lost in that dream was desperately sobbing, knowing what was going to happen soon.

His mother shuddered and gazed at him in horror and amazement, then clearly terrified, just like she simply couldn’t understand. Gaping, shocked, but no sound came out of her mouth.

"Wayan...?" she then made, uncertain, a lump in her throat.

He stepped forward.

She stepped back.

She reached a trembling hand out. "Who are you?"

"Mama... I...."

"NO!" she yelled. "You're not my son, you're a devil... you're the devil who took him from me!"

"Mama..."

She gasped. "Don't! Don’t come close to me! Who's going to believe me now? The white men will come and take the whole village down, they will kill us all!". She took a few more steps back, towards the hut. "Get out! Go away, you monster!"

"Mama... I... mama, I'm scared!"

But she wasn't listening to him anymore. She rushed towards the hut and barred the door, Wayan on her heels, trying to open it, pounding hid child fists on the wood. "Mamaaaa... mama, open the door!!!"

He heard a sudden thud. Then silence happened.

_I was hearing words in black and white_

_Twisted up inside my broken mind_

_Outstretched dirty hands just like a child_

_Hungry little fool, but you were mine_

_You're all I Have_

_You're all I Have_

Wayan desperately dug a hole through the straw and mud of the walls, crying. And he saw her.

Alec was sitting on a chair at Magnus’ bedside... how long had he been stuck there? He had lost track of time. He didn't sleep, he didn't eat. Time was marked only by the relentless machines hum and the faint beep of the electrocardiograph recording the vital parameters of the man who was his life, and whom that life he would gladly give to, if it could help.

He watched Magnus frantically fidgeting in that deep, plumbeous sleep and wondered what he was seeing, which ghosts were haunting him behind his closed eyelids, as he tried to read the feelings unravelling on that so much loved face.

_In my body I fight fire  
With the snow, my hell is cold  
In my body I have a soft light  
Burning low, but too hot to hold  
I've become the only thing I hate  
Leave this broken body today_

He took Magnus’ hand into his own, stroking it and kissing his fingers one by one, trying to convey his life force into that gesture, just like when he had offered it to him for healing Luke.

“I don’t know if you can hear me…but this is my fault. I was selfish. When you first lost your powers and you said you were ok with it, I didn’t think twice. I guess I was just so happy that maybe we could..grow old together “ .

He sniffed.

“I guess i just didn’t realize, deep down, how much you were suffering. Magnus I love you, more than anything in the world, and I’m so sorry..I’m sorry

He was crying. Just like he’d been endlessly crying during those dull aching days? Watching that so much loved and worshipped body lying unconscious in that bed, the only sound coming from the machines that were keeping it alive. Magnus looked like he was trapped in an endless dream, in a place where Alec could not reach him, while all his being yearned for that closeness.

He had asked Catarina if she could help him join Magnus in that dream; he would gladly lose himself in the limbo of Magnus’ mind, to be with him forever. Somehow.

But Catarina told him she couldn’t do it – better, she refused to do it. Magnus had to heal himself, she said, recovering after rejecting a foreign magic... if he could.

Alec tried to be optimistic and not to think about a possible world without Magnus in it: a world that Alec did not want to be part of. Torn between his duties and the invisible chain keeping him tied to that bedside, he went on talking to his man; Clary had told him that, among the mundanes, people in a coma happened to follow the voice of their loved ones to find their way back to them. Alec himself recalled how much he had felt Magnus' presence when he got lost in limbo searching his _parabatai_.

So, this hope kept him stuck there, next to that bed, clutching and kissing his man’s hand without even noticing the tears pouring along his cheeks.

Catarina entered the room.

"May I come in? Am I bothering you?"

Alec sighed. "No, of course, please come in." He rose wearily to his feet. "News from the Spiral Labyrinth?" "Nothing at all ," Cat replied, "They have no idea of what's happening to him, there's never been a case like this, as far as they know."

Alec closed his eyes, as if he were in sudden pain.

"Then I suppose we only have hope left." He ran his hands through his hair. He was aware he needed a shower, food, sleep; yet he could not persuade himself to get away from Magnus' bedside. He went back, bending over the bed. "I'll be right back, love" he whispered.

Catarina turned her back to them, trying to make herself scarce without meddling with such an intimate moment.

__

Wayan had said good-bye to her.

Once again he had failed at saving his mother – but he also knew the past could not be altered. What could happen with the future, eventually?

Yet, even after all those decades, the nightmare was always there, in the back of his mind, ready to torment him again as soon as his wards gave way.

He knew that, in some way, he needed to let his mother’s memory go, let her rest in peace, forgiving himself, reminding only their shared love, their relationship so close it could never embrace anyone else.

He looked around. Reached his hands, he THOUGHT they were his hands, out, but the fog had returned so thick that he could no longer see anything. He was merely floating in a limbo, devoid of any image and sensation, even his own body perception had changed.

He no longer felt bound to his physical body, disappearing just like an intangible spirit lost in a sort of permanent twilight, and wondered if that would be his destiny, from now on. No longer feeling anything, neither pleasure nor pain, without any knowledge of the time going by, oblivious to everything... loveless.

Love.

 _Love_.

He had loved, his whole life. A lot. Passionately, offering himself utterly and completely, craving for an affectionate look, a friendly word, a passionate hug.

Yet, nothing and no one could make him feel whole, make him perceive two souls intertwining, sharing everything, even the most secret thoughts and the most intimate sensations. _Soulmates_. Sharing life with someone he could confess his rough past to, without fearing judgment, or worse, being left behind. Because abandonment terrified him the most, and hence he had always been the one cutting his relationships first, so as he hadn’t to feel he was never enough, the one who did not deserve love, and therefore, better get first, right? Better be in control, and avoid hurting.

 _But, wait_.

He suddenly felt something bloom in his chest, an unusual warmth. He tried to listen to his own heartbeat, but all he could hear was the incessant rhythmic sound of... something mechanical... a... a... how do they call it – damn his confused mind, lost in a daze – that was his heart beating, though sounding so alien.

Then that too disappeared, as Wayan tried to reach consciousness – reality?

In his clouded mind a voice made its way.

_“I don’t know if you can hear me…but this is my fault”._

Fault? Fault about what?

There are no culprits here, only victims.

_"I guess I was just so happy that maybe we could.. grow old together"_

Getting old together... but that was the outlook of mortals, and the reason why their lives burned with such an intense flame. He was immortal. But was immortality really that precious? Was it really worth not FEELING anything, though EXPERIMENTING everything?

_"Magnus I love you, more than anything in the world, and I'm so sorry.. I'm sorry."_

Sorry? Why? What for?

Who are you, whose tears I suddenly feel flowing onto my hands, making me suddenly realize that I FEEL. I feel my body. I'm here. Myself. Real.

Alec. _Alexander_.

Is that you? Where are you?

Wait for me. I'm coming back. You're the only one I want to go back to. You're the only one who can heal me, erase the pain of my past and make me feel like a brand new man.

A man. A mortal, but this doesn't matter at all.

I love you too.

_I want to love like a man_

_I'll build you a home when I can_

_Give my new body a chance_

_Patient now it's all that I have_

_I fought the world for your hand_

_I fought the world for your hand_

_Give my new body a chance_

_Oh, give my new body a chance_

I hear your voice, and it's an angel calling me. But I want to love you like a man, to be your home, I will fight the world for your hand.

Wayan opened his eyes – but it was Magnus awakening, staring into another pair of adoring eyes, into a face sporting a teary smile.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a gift to the most delightful, funny, hilarious gc on Twitter, Home (Away from House): thanks, gals, for the laughters, the sexy innuendos, the fic exchange, the banter, everything, you're the best!
> 
> No beta was harmed, so characters belong to Cassandra, mistakes...are mine


End file.
